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Wednesday, December 26, 2007

On the online auction giant's new MicroPlace site, investors can lend as little as $50 to would-be small business owners around the globe

Tracey Pettengill Turner doesn't want to give handouts to poor people. But she does want to make investments in them. So on Oct. 24, Turner is launching MicroPlace.com, a Web site that lets small investors provide low-interest "micro" loans, of $50 or more, to would-be small business owners. Her hope is to create sustainable economic growth in the world's most impoverished communities—and do her part to expand the reach of the microfinance industry to more than 1 billion people worldwide, from about 100 million people currently.

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

More than 5,000 IPCs recently gathered in Hanoi, Vietnam, to welcome HIRO beverages to their exploding market.

The sold-out event included dance performances, music, a playintroducing HIRO, and models showing off the brand new Energy,Mobility, and Vitality drinks. IPCs came from all over the country,some traveling overnight in buses and trains for five, seven, and even12 hours just to be there.

The Commodore 64 may be gone, but it's certainly not forgotten. Fans turned out in the hundreds Monday night for the PC's 25th anniversary party at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. CNET News.com's Kara Tsuboi raised a glass and chatted with industry leaders, including Steve Wozniak, Apple's co-founder, and Jack Tramiel, the founder of Commodore International, about the Commodore's impact on the personal-computing market.

I downloaded the release candidate of Vista Service Pack 1 yesterday and was prepared to wait till its public debut next week before writing about it. But after upgrading a few machines here and doing some tests, I changed my mind. If Microsoft’s decision to ditch the WGA kill switch in SP1 didn’t convince you, would you be interested in a 300% increase in tripling your network file transfer speeds?

As you can see, the file transfers under Vista SP1 were dramatically faster than the Vista RTM times. For the directory full of many small files, the performance increasethroughput was more than 300%; for the large files, the speed increase was roughly 260%. Note that you can expect similar results when transferring files from Vista to systems running Windows XP or Windows Server 2003.

Monday, December 3, 2007

A British teacher at a high school in Sudan, Gillian Gibbons, 54, was arrested on blasphemy charges for allowing her six- and seven-year-old students to name a class teddy bear "Mohammed," says the Telegraph. She was interrogated for five hours, according to the Daily Mail, and the teacher now may face forty lashes and six months in prison. Protests against Ms. Gibbons, a divorced mother of two, have broken out all over Sudan and the school has been closed through January to prevent retaliation.